There’s too much Science Fiction for us to ever be one fandom. Good.

The world of Science Fiction today is big.

Really big.

You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mindbogglingly big it is, and the chances are the bits of Science Fiction I love the most right now are going to be things you’ve never even heard of, let alone had the time to read / watch / play / complain about on social media.

We’re creating and consuming more SF&F cultural material than ever before, and it only takes a quick online search for trailers, new books, new shows, comics, spin-offs, fan fiction, books of the film of the console game etc to know that our chances of ever keeping up are doomed to beautiful failure.

How lucky we are!

And yet there’s a growing problem in the midst of this abundance. For instance last year’s debacle surrounding the hijacking of the Hugo Awards was caused by a small contingent of writers and their fans protesting that their particular favourite works were being overlooked.

If you tried really, really hard to ignore all the ugliness that sprang from that argument and boiled it down to just one simple, personal point of view - stuff I think is great never seems to get nominated, what’s up with that? - you might momentarily fool yourself into thinking they had a point, but hold on…

None of my favourite works were nominated for a Hugo that year either.

Or last year.

Or, you know, pretty much ever.

Chances are plenty of your favourite works never get nominated for awards either.

In the UK alone there’s a couple of hundred new books of genre interest published every year. A truly dedicated reader might read upwards of 50 books a year (I did a survey) but even then only a portion will be from the current year — we’re also busy re-reading old favourites, discovering past genre classics or even cracking the spine on something (gasp) non-genre.

Given the odds it’s hugely probable that all of our personal favourite stuff will never win any awards. Heck, I’ve been running the UK’s main science fiction book prize for the best part of a decade and it’s often the case that my favourites still don’t win.

Am I in a secret conspiracy against myself?

I think not.

Are the books that do win utterly awesome?

You bet.

Do judges sneak through my bookshelves at night swapping out my favourites for theirs?

If only it were that easy.

The truth is your favourite Science Fiction and mine are likely not the same, but this realisation shouldn’t be the spark for another flame war.

As the limits of our Science Fiction culture continue to grow, we all owe it to ourselves to grow up along with it.

There’s simply too much good stuff out there in the universe for us to do otherwise.

A version of this article was originally published in SFX magazine, the official media partner of the Arthur C. Clarke Award, issue 270.